The Price of Carbon Absolution

Worrying about everything else is wearing down my sanity. Worrying about climate change feels like a welcome, familiar distraction because the solutions are so linear. We can literally money our way out of this one, but it's a lot of money? How much, exactly, is the personal price of carbon absolution?

Offsetting the carbon emissions of the blog, and then some.

Worrying about climate change is wearing down my sanity, and I'm know I'm not alone. I wanted to find a way let others reduce the amount of CO2 and methane in the air that didn't cost them money. One way is to buy carbon offsets with money from advertisements, like the ones that roughly 10% of you see at the top and side of this blog.

Is that futile?

How much carbon emissions are produced by a visit to a website like this? How does that compare to the cost of offsets? This is going to be a rabbit-hole of citations and unit conversion, so buckle in.

Annual Report to Stakeholders 2018-19

Every year in grad school I had to write a report on my research and academic progress. I found it a useful exercise so I've continued to do so as a faculty member and post-doc.

Summary: 

Professionally, this year was a struggle just to keep my head above water. I expect next year to be more productive in general, as well as more research oriented.

Annual Report to Stakeholders 2017-18

Summary: 

The last year has been a lot like the year before which works out well mostly. There are a few things I still haven't done that I wanted to which makes it feel a bit like stagnation but let's focus on the victories instead.

Having more professional experience has allowed me to do many of the same things professionally as last year but on a larger scale and faster. For example I taught 6 classes this year, up from 5 last year. I wrote a lot more material, edited a lot more papers, and read a lot more books.

Annual Report to Stakeholders 2016-17

Executive Summary (informally, the ‘TL;DR’):

Accomplishments this year felt like a natural extension of the previous year. The amount of writing dedicated to teaching five courses does not reflect the proportion of this year's effort that went towards that.

For reference, last year's report is found here 


Personal:

Gabriela and I have the start of a family going; she has moved in and we have a chihuahua-poodle puppy. People that are impressed that Einstein did all that he did with a family of five children are probably the same people that have never seen a dog like this.


Education (Learning):

I have read extensively on the craft of scientific writing. Among the most useful books have been 'The Chicago Guide to Communicating Science' and 'The Copy Editor's Handbook' for my own learning and various IELTS and TOEFL test preparation guides for teaching preparation. There are many books on academic writing, few books on scientific writing, and apparently none on statistical writing.

Between a ten-day trip to Brazil, and many conversations with Gabriela and her Brazilian friends,, I can call myself an intermediate learner of Portuguese. I also finished all the Portuguese lessons on Duolingo, and got this nifty trophy!

Although I haven't obtained any more SAS certifications, I did gain more depth as a necessity to teaching Stat 342.

I read several books on chess and chess variants. This was in order to answer the personal question 'why is our current set of rules, also called Queen's Chess, the canonical set of rules and not some other iteration?'. So far, the best answer I have the same answer for why words are spelled the way they are, or why the US uses the imperial measurement system: That's what the most popular set of rules were at the time they were frozen by their widespread, reproducible use.

I took the test to be on Jeopardy! To study for this, I played at home, read trivia books, and played the mobile version of the game until I was in the top 200 of 40,000+ players. Only 4% of test takers are contacted for an interview, and I was among the remaining 96%.

Education (Teaching):

Including this summer, I have taught five courses: Stat 305, Stat 342, Stat 201 (twice), and Stat 203. All courses except 342 were service courses, and all courses except 203 were new to me. My ratings are now collectively only slightly above average, but my applause record is still perfect at 5/5 (and one missing due to snowstorm).

In the last 12 months, about 700 students have had me as a lecturer.

Earlier this summer, I gave a series of 5 two-hour seminars on R programming for the graduate students and faculty in the department. The topics of the seminars were vectorization, optimization, scraping and cleaning text data, imputation, and using GGplot, respectively.

I also gave an invited lecture (over video conferencing) to Kevin Kniffin's sports science class at Cornell University. I gave a presentation of data mining tools to the SFU Sports Analytics Club.

In the next year, I will be teaching 203, 305, and 342 again. The notes for 305, and especially 203, are robust, but 342 needs work. Stat 342 is the SAS programming course, and I want to give it more depth this time around.

The other course for next year, Stat 300, is statistical writing, for which I've made extensive preparations.

Research:

The hockey pace paper that Rajitha, Tim, I wrote was accepted and we did a round of suggested revisions and some other improvements. Kevin Kniffin and Christian Hilbricht (of Cornell University) and I co-authored a paper on the timeout in hockey. I wrote my first solo paper on goalie fatigue in hockey. I also submitted the network analysis work from the thesis to ArXiV.

I updated the previously mentioned hockey research on the overtime loss rule at the Cascadia Sports Conference in Vancouver in September with recent years of data, as well as additional depth on shot count. However, the results were less significant than expected, meaning that teams are playing closer , there were negative results.

I networked in person with some potential collaborators at the University of Campinas in Brazil.

Publishing and Service:

I have started writing a coursepack / textbook on statistical writing. So far, along with material from the blog, I've made

- A test based on IELTS to see if the book and course are appropriate for you.

- An assignment on writing scientific questions

- An assignment, complete with example, to write a shortened paper for general interest

- A collection of example 'microconsults', based on my answers to statistics questions on online forums.

- Two reading comprehension assignments based on reproducibility and on undergrad research (in addition to the four such assignments previously posted on the blog)

2 papers were refereed for the Open Journal of Statistics.

7 papers were copy-edited for the Canadian Journal of Statistics.

20 blog posts were made and kept, not including this one. This is down from last year's 26, but the length of the posts are trending longer, and popularity of the blog itself is trending higher. The post on the Jeopardy analysis has more than 1300 views as of writing this.

3 students' theses were helped toward completion through copy-editing, coding, and/or consulting.

Game Design:

Not my accomplishment, but I funded (solo, not crowd) the creation of a mobile game by a friend. It's still in pre-alpha, but he's making a lot of progress.

Annual Report to Stakeholders 2015-16

As a grad student, I had to submit an annual report on my academic activities and the progress I was making in the PhD.

This year, I neglected to submit one, but since it's a good exercise in perspective, I’m doing a more general one here for myself and the major stakeholders in my life.

Executive Summary (informally, the ‘TL;DR’): 

The two most important things of this year were meeting Gabriela and defending my PhD thesis. Both of those successes owe a great deal to the development and effort of the previous years than anything particular I did this year.

Personal:

This year I enjoyed a lot more success in making personal connections than professional progress; a year and a day ago I met Gabriela and we are very much in love. This may seem sappy and out of place in an annual report, but this is a life report and it’s easy to understate these sort of things because they’re difficult to quantify. Gabi is  extremely important to me, and she deserves to be mentioned here. Establishing a relationship of this quality takes a lot of effort, but it has been tremendously rewarding.

Education (Learning):

They say completing a doctorate is a marathon, not a sprint. If that’s true, mine felt like the Boston Marathon; some parts crossed the finish line a lot sooner than others. The spirit of the thesis was done a year ago - written, submitted, and with a defense scheduled. This year, I added a new short chapter, and added a new layer of proofreading to the old chapters, but that’s it. While writing this extra chapter, which was an application of my new method to a database, I learned enough about the Canadian legal system to spark an appetite for more (so, very little).

For projects and curiosity, I’ve learned about meta-analysis, validation, item response theory, web-crawling, copy editing, and an introductory amount about the statistical method INLA.  

Duolingo says I’m now about 20% fluent in Portuguese. In the near-term future, I hope to push that higher at a rate of 10% per month.

In the short/mid-term, I hope to gain more depth in using SAS (and take more SAS certification exams to solidify this), and to learn more about the law (and to take the LSAT, likewise).

Education (Teaching):

In the spring I lectured Stat 302 to about 300 students. I’ve already talked about this in detail in my postmortem. Student evaluations rated my teaching higher than both the school and faculty average in almost every category. Also, I got applause, so 2/2 there.

Only 10-20% of the material was able to be recycled from Stat 203 and from other notes. However, that means a LOT of new notes and assignments and assignments were added to my personal corpus of notes.

One of the two courses I’m teaching in the fall, Stat 305, will recycle 50% of its material from 302 and 203. Of the other half, I already have the notes of five lectures completed.

I also have been doing some assignment design for a 400-level course on big data methods that Luke Bornn is teaching in the fall, and I did a guest lecture for the 400-level Statistics of Sport course.

Research:

Lots of little scattered things. 

Harsha, Tim, and I wrote another cricket paper. Rajitha, Tim, and I wrote a hockey paper. Kurt Routley (in Computer Science) and I co-presented a talk on data mining in hockey. A health sciences paper linking depression and sexually risky behaviour in South Africa was published after years of delay.

Not really shown in the thesis was the additional development of the Approximate Bayesian Computation work that Steve Thompson and I made in the last year. Very recently we got some coveted data from the CDC that we can use to revive some analyses from 2014-5.

I’ll be presenting some hockey research on the overtime loss rule at the Cascadia Sports Conference in Vancouver in September, and Paramjit and I will be reviving a old paper on this with some new depth.

I’ve met with at least five other groups about other research projects all across the board, but without any deliverables that I can mention here.

Publishing:

4 papers were refereed: 3 for the Open Journal of Statistics, 1 for the Canadian Journal of Statistics. 

6 papers were copy-edited: 3 for networking purposes, 1 that did the analysis for as well, 1 at the request of a faculty member, and 1 as a skill test for the Canadian Journal of Statistics.

26 blog posts were made and kept, not including this one.

Game Design:

I haven’t posted the details here, but a very basic (pre-alpha) working prototype of Scrabble Dungeon on PC. A player place tiles in a crossword grid from a designated starting tile to an ending point in order to win the game. Wall tiles, pre-placed tiles, and gem pickups are functioning. Boards of any layout and size can be loaded into the game that contain these elements. Parts of the card system are working, and two of the cards (life relic and meta relic) are included.

The goal is to eventually get the game onto the Android Play Store, but I may also settle for a PC version if it’s less of a headache. 

Temporary Blogging Slowdown, Future Plans

It was my original intention to publish four posts on this blog throughout each week. However, I am currently in the last few months of my PhD thesis in Statistics at Simon Fraser University.

Most of my writing effort is being funneled into that in the hopes of defending before the end of next semester. As such, any posts that appear here until the thesis is submitted will be less frequent and of lower effort, such as the laser tag ranking post instead of the goal difference average posts.

With luck, there will be a burst of high-quality material here in here in the late summer and fall to make up for the slack and bring the average back to 4+ good posts per month. I have a lot left to write about, including:

- Snowball sampling and the network analysis work I'm doing currently.

- Milaap, Kiva, Sunfunder, and lending for good and profit.

- Driving forces behind application specific integrated integrated circuits (ASICs), specifically Bitcoin and Super Nintendo.

- FPGAs , and a pipe dream to build an ASIC for large matrix operations.

- Dealing with scrap textiles, composting, crafting, and future industrial needs.

- Some arguments for landfills being the future of mining. Methane harvests, leachate harvests, necessary drilling advances, and the possible gamification of sorting trash.

- Mental health in academia, and mental health personally.

- Many more kudzu levels.

- Plans for a kudzu app, and a pipe dream of making it a carbon negative game through ad revenue and the European Carbon Exchange.

- An essay on how we all suffer from  diversity defecits in heavily gendered fields, as written by a white, Anglophone, heterosexual, cis, middle class man from a nuclear family in the suburbs. (Not a satire, despite the title)

- ongoing development of a senior undergrad course on data formatting and management,

- more R package spotlights, with priority on mice for multiple imputation, and on gologit for modelling ordinal data.

- ongoing development of the R packette for sums of variables.

- ongoing development of an R packette on "debinning", and the methodology surrounding the partial recovery of within-bin data from binned data and covariate information.

- A 'to do' list for humanity, and preparation for a world of automation.

- A commentary on the energy transistion, peak child, and how the tar sands, arctic drilling, and shale fields  cannot possibly be profitable in the long term.